Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited a common Sense Approach to Web Usability Steve Krug

Punishing me for not doing things your way.
I should 
never
have
to think about formatting data: whether or not to put dashes in my
Social Security number, spaces in my credit card number, or

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parentheses in my phone number. Many sites perversely insist on no
spaces in credit card numbers, when the spaces actually make it much
easier to type the number correctly. Don’t make me jump through hoops
just because you don’t want to write a little bit of code.
Asking me for information you don’t really need.
Most users are
very skeptical of requests for personal information and find it annoying
if a site asks for more than what’s needed for the task at hand.
Shucking and jiving me.
We’re always on the lookout for faux
sincerity, and disingenuous attempts to convince me that you care about
me can be particularly annoying. Think about what goes through your
head every time you hear “Your call is important to us.”
Putting sizzle in my way.
Having to wade through pages bloated
with feel-good marketing photos makes it clear that you don’t
understand—or care—that I’m in a hurry.
Your site looks amateurish.
You can lose goodwill if your site
looks sloppy, disorganized, or unprofessional, like 
no
effort has gone
into making it presentable.
Note that while people love to make comments about the appearance of
sites—especially about whether they like the colors—almost no one is
going to leave a site just because it doesn’t look 
great
. (I tell people to
ignore all comments that users make about colors during a user test,

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unless three out of four people use a word like “puke” to describe the
color scheme. Then it’s worth rethinking.
2
)
2
This actually happened once during a round of testing I facilitated. We changed the color.
There may be times when you’ll choose to have your site do some of these
user-unfriendly things deliberately. Sometimes it makes business sense not
to do exactly what the customer wants. For instance, uninvited pop-ups
almost always annoy people to some extent. But if your statistics show you
can get 10 percent more revenue by using pop-ups and you think it’s worth
annoying your users, you can do it. It’s a business decision. Just be sure you
do it in an informed way, rather than inadvertently.